Saturday, August 16, 2014

Has the Special Implementation Taskforce on Indian Community achieved its objectives?

Press Statement by M Kula Segaran, DAP National Vice
Chairman and MP for Ipoh Barat in Ipoh on August 16, 2014

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Has
the Special Implementation Taskforce on Indian Community achieved its
objectives?

In view of repeated questioning of the government’s s allocation of RM 540
million for Tamil schools, the BN government must come clean on this. BN
government must provide details on how each single sen of the allocation has
been spent.

However, it must be pointed out that Tamil school is
not the only issue which BN government must do its upmost due to its long
neglect of and unfair treatment of these schools.

Today, many long standing issues
that affect the Indians are still not solved, be they economic, employment or
social problems.

Today the Indian community has
achieved some rather unflattering superlatives in the country amongst all the
races: the lowest life expectancy, highest school dropout rate, highest
incidences of alcoholism and drug addiction, highest number of prisoners in
proportion to population and highest suicide rates.

We still have issue of top Indian SPM and STPM scorers failing to get scholarships;
the list goes on including the Governments
own promise to increase Indians equity participation from 1.1% to 3% by 2010 being
postponed in 2010 to 2010.

As Datuk Subramaniam, the Minister of Health was
appointed in 2011 as the Minister overseeing the newly minted committee
known as “Special Implementation Taskforce on Indian Community (PM Department),
he should present a regular public report card to the Indian community.

In particular, he should explain if he has achieved
the Taskforce’s objective of enabling Indians to “access the service, programs
and projects of the Federal Government in a just, fair and equitable way”.

Further, the government must also explain why it has
failed to implement terms agreed with Hindraf as the former deputy minister
Wyathamoorthy has openly said the terms as set out in the Memorandum Hindraf
signed with the Government just before the last elections was never
implemented.

DAP had been saying all the while that it would be
foolish to trust the BN government but Wathyamoorthy went ahead and worked with
the BN government and even helped BN to campaign in the last general elections.

But less than 35 % of Indian voters had supported BN
in the last general elections as they did not trust the BN government which had
betrayed the Indians’ trust and support for decades.

But the BN government must not think that the issue is over with Wathamoorthy's
quitting.The Indian community will not
forget the Nambikei slogan shouted by the Prime Minister and will ensure that
BN pays the price at the next general election.